Bird School
A Beginner in the Wood
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An intimate exploration of the lives of birds and their interactions with man, by a preeminent naturalist.
Close to Adam Nicolson’s home in Sussex, there is a forgotten field overrun by bracken and thicketed by brambles. It is the haunt of deer and many birds—nightingales, the occasional cuckoo, ravens, robins, owls, and in summer, the sweet-singing warblers that come north from Africa to breed in English woods.
Wanting to look and listen, to return to “bird school” and see what it might teach him, Nicolson built a small shed among the trees, a kind of man-sized birdhouse he calls an “absorbatory,” complete with nesting boxes and bird feeders. Cocooned inside season after season, he got to know the birds: where they nest, how they sing, how they mate and fight, what preys on them, what they are like as living things.
Woven through with philosophy, literature, science, and a sense of wonder, always conscious that this is an age in which the natural world is under siege, Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, taking a long, careful, and concerned look at our relationship with the wild.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this revelatory narrative, Ondaatje Prize winner Nicolson (Life Between the Tides) shares his experience observing birds near his home in Sussex. After realizing he "had never paid much attention to birds," Nicolson set out to educate himself on the creatures and built a shed in the countryside from which he could study them. In vivid and poetic prose, Nicolson describes the wonders he encountered ("The blackbird's song is like the sound of someone enjoying a lovely dinner, rolling around in his mouth the deliciousness of everything life has given him") and highlights a wide range of avian behaviors, like how songbirds—blackbirds, robins, and wrens—begin vocalizing in a particular order at the break of dawn likely because of their varying eye sizes; the bigger their eyes, the earlier they can detect the morning light and thus start to sing. Nicolson is especially good at illuminating what goes unseen (or unheard), like the fact that birds perceive time more slowly than humans. He also draws attention to the ways human activity, like intensive farming, has caused bird populations to plummet in recent decades. This is a beautiful love letter to the avian world.
